Lisa Williamshttp://tomlinson.org
community | innovationWed, 30 May 2018 02:03:43 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.3Data Science for Better Emailhttp://tomlinson.org/2018/04/data-science-for-better-email/
Sun, 15 Apr 2018 16:07:07 +0000http://tomlinson.org/?p=195How can you use data science to build better email newsletters, and engage people through their inboxes?

Maybe a better question is: Why should we use data science tools to improve our newsletters?

Well, here’s the problem: most email analytics, are, to put it mildly, not very good. They just don’t give you enough information for you to take action on, to do something specific and concrete to move you toward a goal, whether that’s more subscribers, or more engagement from those subscribers, or a specific ‘conversion goal,’ whether that’s becoming a subscriber or donor, coming to an event, or something else.

As a result, too many of us watch our analytics like they’re the weather: our numbers just happen to us.

The great thing about data science tools? We can start to happen to our numbers.

I recently gave a talk via the ONA Speakers’ Bureau on this topic, and you can see my presentation here: Building An Award Winning Email Newsletter. The talk was about how I used data to build The Magic Pill, an ‘audio newsletter’ that won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence In Innovation.

And if you’re really into the technical nitty-gritty and want to try out some data science tools yourself, I wrote a step-by-step tutorial on how to use some open source tools here: Lisa Williams’ Email Data Science Tutorial.

Interested in these topics and want to talk? Feel free to find me on Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams, or drop me a note here.

]]>Measuring Impact: Data for Nonprofit Excellencehttp://tomlinson.org/2017/12/measuring-impact-data-for-nonprofit-excellence/
Wed, 06 Dec 2017 17:12:07 +0000http://tomlinson.org/?p=172How do you know what to measure — and how do you communicate that to your donors, your staff, and the people you serve?

Hack the Hood, a nonprofit I’m proud to work with, has a great approach that I think outlines some key issues:

They worked directly with the youth they serve to figure out what was important to them. Where did they want to grow and improve? These were integrated into an overall evaluation framework.

The output is digital, visual, easy to read and share. It’s something that can easily be shared with funders or people who want to get to know the organization better. It’s even shareable on social media.

They worked together with staff to come to consensus on an evaluation framework — and this is the most important — discussed it regularly. The evaluation framework is part of their regular staff meetings, and it helps staff understand how they are making progress towards the organization’s goals, and areas where they could put more effort in.

They used simple, reusable tools and good visualizations to make it easy to update the data. It’s not just a once a year, or one-off effort. It’s also flexible and extensible; as they learn more, they can change it.

The evaluation framework developed at Hack The Hood was a key part of a big funder win for the organization. They won the Google Impact Grant, which was a game-changer that let them staff up — but the evaluation framework got Google to re-up and even increase their support 50%, something Google rarely does with this program.

]]>Bots Versus Trolls: The Trollbusters Chatbothttp://tomlinson.org/2017/09/bots-for-news-organizations/
Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:13:37 +0000http://tomlinson.org/?p=150Recently I began working with Trollbusters, an organization that helps women writers who are facing online threats and harassment. As you might imagine, it can be hard to figure out how to respond when you are getting dozens or hundreds of harassing messages, or when those messages escalate to calls to your home or employer.

UPDATE: The bot is now live! For a technical writeup covering decisions about tools/platforms, user experience, and deployment, check out Building The Trollbusters Bot.

Trollbusters wanted to build a bot to take people through the process of assessing an online threat and responding to it in a way that was fast, calming, and available 24-7; so I’ve begun building them a Facebook Messenger bot that takes them through Trollbusters’ well-thought out and researched decision tree.

During the process, I’ve thought a lot about how bots might be used in newsrooms, both to engage users and to help respond during a crisis like a natural disaster.

The good news is that bot frameworks have really advanced to the point where there are robust open source options that will work with a variety of platforms — web, Facebook, text, even Slack. I settled on Botpress, an open-source bot framework that runs on top of Node.js. One of the things that attracted me to Botpress was that a single script could run across multiple platforms.

It also has a robust developer community building connector modules, including one that speeds up the process of connecting with the Facebook API. Here’s the script above powering a bot on Facebook:

UPDATE: The bot is now live! For a technical writeup covering decisions about tools/platforms, user experience, and deployment, check out Building The Trollbusters Bot.

]]>Tech for Covering Natural Disastershttp://tomlinson.org/2017/08/tech-for-covering-natural-disasters/
Wed, 30 Aug 2017 02:14:30 +0000http://tomlinson.org/?p=139News organizations have a vital role to play in keeping people informed and connected before, during, and after a natural disaster. As Hurricane Harvey approached the Gulf Coast, fellow news technologist Ben Keith and I worked together to create the Hurricane Harvey Senior Homes Tracker. The tracker allowed news organizations to collaboratively update the status of nursing homes in areas affected by the hurricane. It is embeddable in any website and free to use.

Data Visualization

In addition to web development skills, I have a longtime interest in data visualization as a way to harness strategic insights and communicate them to teams and funders. I designed the Data Visualization Fundamentals course for General Assembly, an education startup, and have designed workshops for nonprofits and social justice organizations to use data visualization to tell their story more effectively. You can see my class outlines and tutorials at Data For Radicals: Data Visualization For Social Justice.

Entrepreneurship/startups

I’ve built several thriving online communities and had two successful exits as a founder.

Fundraising

Lean canvas development

Business plan development

Market size/opportunity assessment

Financial model development

Operations & management

Marketing & audience development

Revenue development, sales, & sales program development

Startup incubator & mentorship programs

Money

I have often been the “money person” on innovation projects, largely because it doesn’t frighten me to ask for money. I’ve raised over $3M in grants. I have also worked directly with pitching customers and pricing products.

Venture fundraising

Grant fundraising

Startup incubator pitches

Working with customers to arrive at a deal for products/services

Pricing products/services

Nonprofit Growth & Management

Many people think nonprofits are fundamentally different from for profits – but just like any other organization, they need to develop something that people need, and develop a strategy for supporting that, including bringing money in the door.

I have served on the boards and done board development work with a number of mission-driven organizations, and through my work at INN, was able to help our 140+ nonprofit news organizations grow, raise money, and reach their goals.

Grant & foundation fundraising

Board development

Strategic planning

Online & mobile giving platforms

Donor management platforms

Membership/Subscribers/Engagement/Audience Development

I’ve worked with many organizations that want to develop recurring sources of revenue through membership or subscriber programs.

Email marketing & automation

Mobile payment/fundraising systems

Social retargeting (using social media data to match individuals with products & content)

Data & analytics

Knowledge of public media organizations and independent, not-for-profit news organizations (Bringing NPR-style fundraising into other organizations)

Audience/customer research

Human-centered design processes/Market Based Product Management

I have a real passion for matching solutions with users — and making sure the market is big enough to support a new product.

Human Centered Design Skills/Market Based Product Management

Interviewing users for product development insights

Running design sessions for stakeholders

Vetting and evaluating design and web development partners

Writing an initial spec/site or app plan to share with stakeholders

Identifying and evaluating web developers/web development firms for projects

Market research (is the market you’re targeting big enough? is it growing?)

Competitive analysis

Business canvas/MVP planning

Using projects as a way of giving tech teams the opportunity to move into modern ways of working (Agile/Scrum) with more modern infrastructure/tools.

Random

Motorcycles and scooters. I own a small-format motorcycle that’s a cult favorite in Japan. Simple and powerful, it has no electric starter — I have to kick start it. I got my start with two wheeled vehicles with Vespas and still own one, which I am rehabbing.

Zombie Apocalypse Survival Skills: It surprises me that I have developed an interest in the kind of old-fashioned skills my grandmother would have known intimately. I can make blankets, can vegetables and fruit, and I have a large kitchen garden in my backyard. If the zombie apocalypse comes, come to my house: we’ll still have food.

Sure, everybody’s interested in brunch. But not everybody throws brunch for 40 on the regular like I do.

Contemporary art. I developed an interest in contemporary art and go to gallery openings and collect works by contemporary artists, primarily abstract work. I also write about it, on a static/Jekyll based site I developed from scratch.

I volunteer with a number of organizations that work with recovering women in the Boston area.

I helped create and launch The Magic Pill, an NPR podcast that is also a 21-day exercise challenge. This project won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation, primarily for the way it used data-driven techniques to personalize the experience for users and drive higher donation rates.

I’ve been very fortunate in my career to lead teams doing award-winning work. To learn more about my professional background, view awards and board service, or see a chronological listing of my career, start here.

We live in an exciting era — one where the tools of data visualization and the availability of data have reached a point where it’s not just for specialists anymore. Anyone with curiosity, some basic computer skills, and a dash of fearlessness can learn how to use data visualization skills to do whatever it is that they do better.

But perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves about any new endeavor is this: why bother? Why take the time to become data fluent? Why take the time to master the basic building blocks of how to present that data to others?

I can’t tell you why you might bother, but I can tell you why I do. I think a good data visualization can be a force for unity, insight, even justice, just the way a song, a documentary, or a march can.

There’s another reason why I believe it matters. More and more often, the most important stories facing our communities and our world are distributed — they’re not happening in one place, to one person or group of people.

They’re happening to many people in many different communities. As an example, think of the foreclosure crisis. Typically, we try to tell these stories by telling the story of an individual, and hoping that people will make the mental leap to allow this person to stand in for the huge number of people facing the same problem. But this “storytelling by anecdote” method has its limits: in particular, it leaves us open to he said-she said types of debates, where people with another agenda try to win arguments simply by having better anecdotes, whether those a

necdotes represent a widespread problem or an isolated incident.

My interest in giving more people tools to have the kinds of insights that can really make change in communities is the basis for the popular Data Visualization for Absolute Beginners course I give at General Assembly. If you’d like to follow along yourself, I’ve written a number of highly illustrated, step-by-step tutorials for creating your first data driven map, scatterplot, and other helpful data presentations.

I think it would surprise many people that beauty was one of my primary motivators in creating Placeblogger, a searchable index of local weblogs which I ran from 2007-2013. While running H2otown, an online community and news site in Watertown, Massachusetts, I began to feel a sense of connection with community that I had never felt before. Simple things about my town seemed beautiful and meaningful in a new way.

At the time, many people would ask me, how many hyperlocal sites like H2otown are there? I began to count and was surprised at how many, how varied, and how good many of them were. I began Placeblogger as a way to “listen in” to the kind of community conversations that I’d come to love in Watertown.

Placeblogs are an act of sustained attention to a place and its people over time. Many produced thriving online communities, better connections to civic information, and the kind of shared appreciation of what’s beautiful about a particular community.

Our communities and our nation face increasing problems with political polarization, and a frightening rise in the number of people who are being taken in by fake news.

In our fast-paced social media era, how can we give people a new experience of complex topics and help them arrive at a shared appreciation of the facts? How can we create community around an important issue?

That was the question our team asked ourselves in developing The Magic Pill, an innovative NPR podcast aimed at helping people understand the benefits of exercise, and the science of motivation in a way they could take action on. After all, who hasn’t had the experience of knowing that exercise is good for them, but not actually doing it, or feeling confused or frustrated when one day butter is reported as bad for your health, the next day good? We wanted to help listeners arrive at a place where they could balance incoming information about health AND have their own experience with it.

Most journalism is designed for passive consumption — I write, you read; I film, you watch; I record, you listen. We asked ourselves, “What would happen if we designed journalism to act on?”

In combination with health and science journalist Carey Goldberg, and Dr. Eddie Phillips, who works for the Veterans Administration and is the director of the Institute for Lifestyle Medicine, we developed The Magic Pill, a podcast that is also a 21 day exercise challenge.

Podcasts are short, fast and fun — somewhere between six and ten minutes.

They’re delivered via email to the subscriber’s inbox each morning for 21 days.

Everyone who signs up gets their own “Day 1” of the challenge, and gets 20 days of email with bonus material and episodes.

This was a huge departure from WBUR’s typical method of developing, producing, and delivering a podcast.

We used human-centered design practices to develop the idea. Instead of coming up with an idea and hoping people liked it, we started first with people: young and old, black and white, NPR listeners and non-listeners. We asked what their days were like, how they used media, what their needs were. This gave us vital insights that allowed us to match what we developed to what listeners told us they needed.

We used Agile project management methods to organize our team. Developing a new podcast usually takes more than a year; we were able to bring Magic Pill from focus groups where we uncovered needs to launch in less than six months.

We used email to deliver the podcast instead of iTunes. This allowed us to get to know listeners a lot better, and for the first time we could respond to user behavior. For example, if a user didn’t open three episodes in a row, we could send them a special bonus episode with tips about how to get back on the wagon with exercise. Email delivery turned out to bring in many people who were first-time podcast listeners, as well.

We were able to use technology to be smart about approaching listeners who we felt would be the most interested. Typically when launching a new product, WBUR had simply used broadcast methods — on air promos and social media that went out to all listeners/followers with the same message. We were able to segment our audience based on their social media interests and find people who were interested in fitness or in a healthcare profession and invite them specifically to subscribe.

But did it work?

7,000 people signed up during the launch period — unheard of for an unknown podcast with unknown hosts.

90% said they would rate it 3 or 4 stars and would recommend it to a friend.

44% were first-time podcast listeners.

The conversion rate (the number of people deciding to support the station) jumped from six-tenths of one percent to 4.6%, a major finding as the station moves towards digital membership.

Nick Quah, writing on HotPod: “It’s always a wonder to find a place that’s doing strange and wonderful things. One such place is Boston public radio station WBUR, which will be launching an experimental 21-day fitness podcast project called The Magic Pill.” More.

This is Nicnoc — he’s a space alien (and, okay, a puppet). His job is to understand human behavior — exclusively through town council meetings in Watertown, Massachusetts. The gag is that Nicnoc doesn’t really understand anything he sees — he gets everything wrong.

Nicnoc was a popular feature on H20town, an online community I launched in 2004 and ran until 2009. Production values were low, budgets lower, and jokes were pretty silly.

I knew we had something special with H2otown when participants in the online community threw themselves a first birthday party (they were kind enough to invite me!).

But why present news in this way? I think sometimes we forget that not everybody feels entitled to have an opinion about everything. It can be hard to remember this, as blowhards often dominate online conversations. But bringing in people who might not feel they have much to say about who’s running for school committee, or the politics of the zoning board, was vital to this project’s success. Humor, and bridging questions, were really vital in broadening the online community and making it into something organic that community members themselves felt they had some ownership in.

It’s easy to go wrong when using humor in a community context, too. Even a site like H2otown quickly became seen as an authority to people who read it every day. A peer who cracks a joke is fun; an authority figure who does risks being seen (or actually becoming) a bully. My approach: I made sure the joke was always on us, never on community members.